A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple. Show all posts

Sunday, May 31, 2026

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Sam Locke, Robert Rhodes, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Maura Bird, Connor Newall, Lewis Ashbourne Serkis, Mirren Mack, David Sterne, Cillian Murphy. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Carson McCall, Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir. 

A pandemic has swept the world, leaving the survivors at the mercy of the worst among them. Good thing it's just a movie, right? I won't say that Alex Garland, who gave us Civil War (2024), about an American citizenry at odds with its government, didn't have something more in mind than a post-apocalyptic Britain, so let's just keep in mind Oscar Wilde's pronouncement: "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." On the surface, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a worthy successor to, maybe even an improvement on, Danny Boyle's 2025 film 28 Years Later, which introduced Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a solo survivor fending off those infected by the Rage Virus we first encountered in Boyle and Garland's 28 Days Later (2003). Film series usually peter out after one or two sequels, but this one has somehow gotten stronger. (I'm not going to say it's because life has copied art, to invoke another Wilde aphorism.) Nia DaCosta's direction is sure-handed, and the cast is more than up to the often gruesome demands of the script. The ending, reintroducing Cillian Murphy as Jim, the survivor from 28 Days Later who hasn't aged much in 28 years, lets us know a sequel is on the way, and for once I don't mind. 

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